My favorite reads of 2025

My favorite read of 2025 was actually my re-read of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch“. But sticking to new works as usual: I read 38 works of fiction and nonfiction for the first time in ’25, and of those I’ve picked out again my favorite ten.

This year I went somewhat dark, for me. I took in more Gothic and horror than is my wont.

I read about murderous hounds and husbands; spontaneously combusted crooks; demons in the form of sulking London lawyers; murders solved by famous London detectives; countries drowning in fog and rain; a bleak house with a ghost-walk, a ruined eternal town somewhere in Colombia, a mansion on a howling moor, an English seaside mansion dominated by its dead mistress; a land in Peru haunted by sudden death on a bridge; a Czech ghetto haunted by something that is possibly a ghost, spirit, idea or memory.

Throw in a wave of Martian tripods and a pair of warring Verona factions, and it’s been a happy year.

I’ve included one book, “The Asylum Seekers,” that cannot be called a ‘favorite’ read in the sense of a great reading experience; it is a documentation, a witness, of suffering on the Mexican side of the American border. It is well-written but its value is not literary, but rather historical and spiritual.

For each of the Top Ten below, I’ve listed some excerpts, not necessarily the “best”, but just a few that made deep impressions.

1. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

******************

We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled — though they were certainly that to — but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent.

******************

“Did the lady die?” 

“No — but she died to him.”

******************

here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.

******************

Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to society.

******************

I said nothing, which I thought a suitable reply

******************

“He is on his last march, miss, and has a whim to see her. He says they can feel for one another, and she has been almost as good as a friend to him here. I came down to look for her, for when I sat by [him] this afternoon, I seemed to hear the roll of the muffled drums.”

******************

“Judy, shake me up a little!”

******************

shooting stars are seen in upper windows

******************

“It’s far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it.” 

******************

“Ask me for a penny more, and I’ll have my lawful revenge upon you.”

******************

“There’s a cruel attraction in the place. You CAN’T leave it.... Cold and glittering devils!... I went to look at the monster. And then I found out how it was, and I was drawn to stay there.”

******************

Darkness rests upon Tom–All–Alone’s. Dilating and dilating since the sun went down last night, it has gradually swelled until it fills every void in the place. For a time there were some dungeon lights burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all–Alone’s, heavily, heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking — as that lamp, too, winks in Tom-all–Alone’s — at many horrible things. But they are blotted out. The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life and blasted by volcanic fires;

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

he found her only in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

*	*	*

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with sounds.

*	*	*

One night he sang. Macondo woke up in a kind of angelic stupor that was caused by a zither that deserved more than this world and a voice that led one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love. 

*	*	*

He locked himself up inside himself and the family finally thought of him as if he were dead.

*	*	*

the rain would not have bothered Fernanda, because, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it had been raining.

*	*	*

Fernanda's indignation also grew, until her eventual protests, her infrequent outbursts came forth in an uncontained, unchained torrent that began one morning like the monotonous drone of a guitar and as the day advanced rose in pitch, richer and more splendid.

*	*	*

Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two wornout old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

*	*	*

She put her elbows on the table, so close and so helpless that Aureliano heard the deep sound of her bones

3. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier

He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery, I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown.

******************

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. 

******************

Not for me the languor and the subtlety I had read about in books. The challenge and the chase. The swordplay, the swift glance, the stimulating smile. The art of provocation was unknown to me, and I would sit with his map upon my lap, the wind blowing my dull, lanky hair, happy in his silence yet eager for his words.

******************

His eyes were the only living things in the white mask of his face.

******************

I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead. 

******************

I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.

4. Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

True, I talk of dreams, 
Which are the children of an idle brain, 
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, 
Which is as thin of substance as the air 
And more inconstant than the wind,

*	*	*

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 
My love as deep. The more I give to thee, 
The more I have, for both are infinite.

*	*	*

Two such opposèd kings encamp them still 
In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will;

*	*	*

brave Mercutio is dead. 
That gallant spirit hath aspired the clouds, 
Which too untimely here did scorn the earth.

*	*	*

Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die, 
Take him and cut him out in little stars, 
And he will make the face of heaven so fine 
That all the world will be in love with night 
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

*	*	*

Yond light is not daylight, I know it, I. 
It is some meteor that the sun exhaled 
To be to thee this night a torchbearer 
And light thee on thy way to Mantua.

*	*	*

Or hide me nightly in a charnel house, 
O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,

5. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below...Thus it was that the determination rose within him at the moment of the accident. It prompted him to busy himself for six years, knocking at all the doors in Lima, asking thousands of questions, filling scores of notebooks, in his effort at establishing the fact that each of the five lost lives was a perfect whole. 

*	*	*

All families lived in a wasteful atmosphere of custom and kissed one another with secret indifference. She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

*	*	*

She hurled herself against the obstinacy of her time in her desire to attach a little dignity to women. At midnight when she had finished adding up the accounts of the House she would fall into insane vision of an age when women could be organized to protect women, women travelling, women as servants, women when they are old or ill, the women she had discovered in the mines of Potosi, or in the workrooms of the cloth-merchants, the girls she had collected out of doorways on rainy nights. But always the next morning she had to face the fact that the women in Peru, even her nuns, went through life with two notions: one, that all the misfortunes that might befall them were merely due to the fact that they were not sufficiently attractive to bind some man to their maintenance and, two, that all the misery in the world was worth his caress. 

*	*	*

She had never brought courage to either life or love.

*	*	*

when they fell from favor he lent them money, when they were ill he outlasted the flagging devotion of their lovers and the exasperation of their maids; when time or disease robbed them of their beauty, he served them still for their beauty's memory; and when they died his was the honest grief that saw them as far as possible on their journey.

*	*	*

even in this kingdom he was lonely, and proud in his loneliness, as though there resided a certain superiority in such a solitude.

*	*	*

He respected the slight nervous shadow that crossed her face when he came too near her. But there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream.

*	*	*

They talked about ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of death; 

*	*	*

she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest.... Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

*	*	*

The first faint streak of sapphire was appearing behind the peaks and in the east the star of morning was pulsating every moment with a more tender intention.

*	*	*

"Give up thinking of me and of everything about me. I no longer exist."

6. The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border, by Cristina Rathbone

"They broke into the house, pushed us to the ground, snatched my two-year-old out of my wife's arms, and then put an AK-47 against his head. 'We will kill him if you don't pay,' they said. I begged them to please leave him alone-to put the boy down and kill me instead. But they laughed and said, 'No. You we will leave alive. It is him we will kill."'

*	*	*

"They shot me three times in the belly." When he lifted his shirt to show me, right there in the middle of the street, I forced myself to look and to at least try to let myself see: two rounded mounds; one long, roughly stitched slash. He hadn't finished, though. "They cut off three fingers too. Look," he said, holding up a hand. "And slashed a machete through my skull," he added, removing his baseball cap to reveal a scar running from the top of his forehead, across the bald dome of his head, and all the way down to the thin ring of hair he had left at the back. "They left me for dead," Martin said then. "But I'm harder to kill than that." And then again, he said, iced-over rage like cataracts in his eyes, "They thought they'd killed me, the narcos. But no."

*	*	*

"we are facing the reality of hundreds of families living out on the streets of our city without food or shelter or medical care .... Let's let that reality be our teacher for now, no?"

*	*	*

we resisted the sometimes overwhelming urge to set about fixing things and spent our energies focusing on the people themselves, just exactly as they were, working with them to create a reliable and wide-open space for anyone and everyone who wanted, even fleetingly, to belong.... It was hard to call the work political, but it was nothing whatsoever like charity.

*	*	*

the life-giving reality of being seen and known and needed.

*	*	*

we maintained our focus on the essential and beloved nature of every single person among us, insisting that, no matter what, each one of us was unique and each one of us was required for the growth of us all. It drove people crazy.

*	*	*

these moments almost never had anything to do with the macro-mission at hand. Instead, they had to do simply with the God-given worth and mind-blowing beauty of each and every plain old human being.

*	*	*

Not big, impressive things but small, real things are the way to love-with, through, and for the other. Small not because we can't be bothered but because we are small ourselves.

*	*	*

Silently-literally, without a single word-this young man pulled out his phone, leaned over toward me, and began scrolling through photo after photo after photo of the remains of his slaughtered family: sprawled and bleeding in the kitchen, slumped in the living room, splayed in the bedroom.

*	*	*

The opposite of the grand gesture, this type of work took time, and restraint, and poverty. It had to be, in the end, birthed by the desire to learn, not to teach; to become, not to shape; to love unconditionally and endlessly because I am also loved unconditionally and endlessly.

*	*	*

And whenever one person is able to fully share themselves with another, it's as if a key turns in a secret door, which then bursts open with the force of this usually hidden world, annihilating in its brightness and also fulfilling in its gentleness.

*	*	*

I am able to pray most deeply when I stop praying all together; when I'm out in the world, vulnerable and worn; and when the last thing I'm thinking about is prayer, or God, or anything in the least bit religious. I am able most deeply to pray when all I am thinking of is the person in front of me.

*	*	*

seeking to be with rather than to fix, and to learn rather than to teach.

*	*	*

"First my oldest boy, then my next, and one day the little one, too, will have to choose: join the cartel or be shot."

*	*	*

"The only reason I am alive is because no one has decided to kill me. Until they do, I will be fine, and the moment they do, I will be dead. There is no point worrying."

*	*	*

But the collision between life on the street right then in Juarez and life on the street thousands of years ago in Bethlehem was giving me a kind of concussion. And as we continued to make our way down the block, asking to come in and being denied, asking to come in and being denied, it felt harder and harder to continue. Instead of joy, or comfort, or even a poignant kind of sorrow, I felt only rage. The story was so old. So foundational. And so precisely enacted there every day. It was too real, perhaps. Too much.

*	*	*

Not enough is better than nothing. Not enough, once accepted, keeps us going and leads us on. Not enough, in the end, draws us toward each other in love and awareness of our mutual need. 

7. The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

*	*	*

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water

*	*	*

Dry bones can harm no one.

*	*	*

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

8. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth and his couch if you have the curiosity to go inside.... you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. 

*	*	*

"I say, Watson," said the baronet, "what would Holmes say to this? How about that hour of darkness in which the power of evil is exalted?" 

As if in answer to his words there rose suddenly out of the vast gloom of the moor that strange cry which I had already heard upon the borders of the great Grim pen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. 

*	*	*

Every minute that white woolly plain which covered one-half of the moor was drifting closer and closer to the house.

9. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells

we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

*	*	*

It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run. I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.... The little group of black specks with the flag of white had been swept out of existence, and the stillness of the evening, so it seemed to me, had scarcely been broken.

*	*	*

What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?

*	*	*

The sixth star fell at Wimbledon.

10. The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink (translated by Mike Mitchell)

"I have thought about this long and often, and I think that the closest approach to the truth is something like this: once in every generation a spiritual epidemic spreads like lightning through the Ghetto, attacking the souls of the living for some purpose which is hidden from us, and causing a kind of mirage in the shape of some being characteristic of the place that, perhaps, lived here hundreds of years ago and still yearns for physical form."

*********************

A human soul had turned to me for help! To me!

.... Now there was something to give meaning to my days, something rich and radiant. Was the rotten tree to bear fruit after all? I could feel a current of vital energy coursing through my veins. It had long slept within me, concealed in the depths of my soul, buried beneath the debris of daily routine, but now it poured forth, like a spring gushing from the ice when the grip of winter is broken. And I knew, just as certainly as I knew I was holding her letter in my hand, that I would be able to help, whatever the danger that threatened her. It was the rejoicing in my heart that gave me that certitude.

Honorable mentions:

“The Shining” and its sequel, “Doctor Sleep,” by Stephen King

“The Island of Dr. Moreau,” by H.G. Wells

And I’ll throw in one honorable reread: “Frankenstein,” by Mary Shelley